Riverside County to send inmates to fire camps

Riverside is the first California county to authorize sending would-be state prisoners that have landed in jail as a result of realignment to state-operated inmate fire camps, officials say.

Riverside County supervisors voted unanimously last week to send up to 200 eligible jail inmates to two nearby camps run by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CalFire, through June 30, 2017.

“There is a little irony here that the state is sending down low-level offenders to counties and we are sending them back to state facilities,” Supervisor Kevin Jeffries said in a telephone interview Thursday.

The expense will be paid from realignment funds allocated to Riverside County by the state, county officials say. And the move is expected to relieve pressure that realignment is placing on the county's five-jail correctional system, from which 6,990 inmates were let out in 2012 to make room for newly sentenced inmates.

“Obviously it’s no secret: we have a very serious capacity problem in our jails,” Assistant Sheriff Steve Thetford told supervisors. “This will give us a little bit of relief, and I emphasize little bit.”

The county's five jails have 3,906 beds.

The fire camp option is one of three being pursued to free up space, said Raymond Gregory, the chief deputy who oversees the correctional system.

Supervisors recently gave the OK to expand an anklet bracelet program that will allow more inmates to go home with electronic devices that track them.

Gregory said the Sheriff's Department also is considering housing inmates in jails of other counties and cities that have extra beds.

"That will be our next push," he said.

As for the fire camps, they likely will begin receiving inmates from Riverside County in late May, Gregory said.

For the balance of this fiscal year, which runs through June 30, the sheriff expects to send about 40 inmates to the Oak Glen camp near Beaumont and the Bautista camp near Hemet at an estimated cost of $87,300.

"We will be able to keep 40 bad guys in jail that otherwise we would have had to release," said Supervisor John Benoit.

Under a 4 1/2-year agreement with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the county may elect to house as many as 200 inmates at the camps. Gregory expects to reach that number in about a year.

According to a staff report, the county would incur a total annual cost of $3.4 million with 200 inmates, based on a $46.19 fee per day per inmate.

By comparison, it costs more than $142 a day to accommodate a person in jail.

Under realignment, Sacramento shifted responsibility for nonviolent criminals from the state to its 58 counties. Since Oct. 1, 2011, local courts have been ordering people convicted of nonviolent felonies, and offenses that are not sex crimes, to do time in jails.

The move was in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling forcing California to thin out its state prison population.

Although the strategy seems to be achieving its intended purpose, it is saddling counties with thousands of felons who in the past would have gone to prison. Sitting at 85 percent capacity in October 2011, Riverside County's jails overflowed in January 2012. And the sheriff has been releasing droves of inmates since, because a federal court order prevents the county from housing more than its lockups are designed for.

The move also has reduced the pool of state prisoners eligible to become inmate firefighters because the ones now being sent to prison upon conviction aren't permitted to serve on fire lines.

“They have to have no violent history to be in this program,” said CalFire spokesman Daniel Berlant in Sacramento.

Berlant said California historically has operated a robust inmate firefighter program, with 39 fire camps, 196 hand crews and 4,300 participating inmates. But this year the number of participants is down by 600.

In response, the state opted to staff crews with fewer inmates in order to avoid eliminating crews, he said.

Berlant said a crew normally is composed of 17 inmates, with a fire captain to lead them. CalFire pared the number on each to between 12 and 14.

The county also contracts with CalFire to provide fire protection in unincorporated areas.

Riverside County Fire Chief John Hawkins said the statewide trend has been felt locally. Although the Oak Glen camp has 160 beds, it houses about 130 inmates, Hawkins said. And he said the 120-bed-capacity Bautista camp has 100 inmates.

“This would help fill these jobs and would keep our firefighting capability where it needs to be,” he said.

Hawkins said there are seven inmate crews at Oak Glen and six at Bautista.

He said an additional four inmate crews work out of the Norco Conservation Camp, based at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco.

The Norco prison is slated to close within the next couple of years and, with it, the conservation camp. Although county inmates aren't going to be housed there, Jeffries said he would hate to lose that local camp.

Consequently, Jeffries has broached the idea of transferring the Norco inmate fire crews to Los Pinos, an unoccupied, former youth correctional camp with about 200 beds in the Cleveland National Forest west of Lake Elsinore.